Saving Christmas from the $hopocalypse

Thursday, December 10, 7 p.m. at The Armory Center for the Arts

Attention holiday shoppers! Conscientious Projector invites you to join Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a barnstorming bus tour of the U.S.A. to free humankind from consumerism and break the bonds of eternal debt. What Would Jesus Buy?– an outrageous but serious-minded docu-comedy about the commercialization of Christmas–will be shown on Thursday, December 10, 7 p.m. at The Armory Center for the Arts.

Producer Morgan Spurlock (SUPER SIZE ME) teams with performance artist/activist Bill Talen (Reverend Billy) and director Rob VanAlkemade to chronicle the satirical protest troupe’s cross-country mission to raise awareness of the impact of over-consumption on our lives, our world and our experience of gift-giving at what is supposed to be the most sacred time of the year. Bill McKibben, Rev. Jim Wallis and many other social critics serve as a Greek chorus as Reverend Billy and his cohorts take us through a journey of revival-style meetings, guerilla theater retail store interventions, corporate exorcisms and the most spontaneous Main Street Parade Disneyland has ever seen. Changeluia!

Tom Coston is going to serve as our facilitator for “What Would Jesus Buy?” Tom brought Reverend Billy, of “What Would Jesus Buy?” here a couple years ago as the Grand Marshal of the Doo Dah Parade.

Thanks to Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Theaters program for their support of this event. The Armory is located at 145 N. Raymond in Old Pasadena. Admission is free and the facility is accessible to disabled persons. For more information, contact Marty Coleman at 626.792.4941 or visit www.wwjbmovie.com.

Pasadena local, The Foundation For Living Beauty put on their second annual retreat to celebrate beauties fighting caner.

Become a fan on facebook and learn more about the foundation.

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MOMbo TV posted their first episode  of The Playdate with Elizabeth House (a crisis house for pregnant women in Pasadena)!

Click here to view!

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CONSCIENTIOUS PROJECTOR BURNING THE FUTURE: COAL IN AMERICA

THURSDAY MAY 14 7:00 p.m. THE ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS 145 NORTH RAYMOND OLD PASADENA

David Novack’s searing examination of the myth of “clean coal” and the devastation wrought by mountaintop removal extraction takes us deep into the mines of Appalachia and the uprooted lives of residents of Bob White, West Virginia. The story centers on local coal miner’s daughter Maria Gunnoe, who refuses to idly stand by while family and neighbors face deadly diseases, toxic drinking water and the destruction of their natural surroundings and traditional way of life. For her heroic efforts organizing fellow townspeople and advancing their struggle to the national stage, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the environment.

A community discussion with environmentalist Ted Baumgart will follow the film.

Conscientious Projector is sponsored by the Sustainable World ministry of All Saints Church in association with the Center for the Theater of the Oppressed and The Armory Center for the Arts.  Thanks to Brave New Theaters for their partnership in arranging this screening. For more info, contact Marty Coleman at 626.792.4941 or visit www.burningthefuture.org.

145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, California 91103

Phone: 626.792.5101
Fax: 626.449.0139
General email: information@armoryarts.org

Come check out Day One’s booth at the Greening of the Earth Day in Pasadena on April 25th, 2009!

Day One is a community-based nonprofit organization with a 20-year history of providing effective, high quality and culturally-sensitive public health education, intervention, and policy development by involving health policy advocacy and community mobilization efforts for alcohol, tobacco, and other drug prevention.

MISSION 
Day One provides an organizational structure by which the cities of Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre and the Greater San Gabriel Valley can reduce the problems associated with alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use. Day One convenes, coordinates, and provides prevention services.

VISION 
Day One strives to help area residents realize communities that are free from the negative repercussions of substance abuse.

Day One
175 North Euclid Avenue 
Pasadena, California 91101
Telepone: (626) 229-9750 
Fax: (626) 792-8056 
Email: staff@dayonepasadena.com

Buy Local Pasadena has a new Facebook page! If your’re a friend, please join our group to advocate for a sustainable economy and thriving culture in Pasadena and its neighboring cities! 

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54662951261&ref=ts

Come join the Pasadena Planning and Development meeting this Tuesday, November 18th and hear about the Plastic Bag Reduction Plan. Whether you are a business owner in Pasadena or a resident who is interested in the community and environment of our city, learn more about Pasadena’s goal to reduce plastic waste.

Agenda – Special Meeting, Environmental Advisory Commission

November 18, 2008, 6:00 pm

City Hall Council Chambers, 2nd Floor, Room S249

100 N. Garfield Avenue, Pasadena 91101

Pasadena’s Buy Local neighbor in Monrovia, CA, experimented with his own version of the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter. Here’s what our friend, Eric (of ImageDomain) suggests as an alternative to ground-grown tomatoes:

If you have ever grown tomatoes in the ground, you know what “hook-worms” are; those ugly green caterpillars that destroy your plants and your harvest. You also know about constant staking and supporting of all the new growth as the plant gets bigger. No matter how hard I try, I seem to always miss something and weight of the tomatoes eventually break a big stem.

Here is a cool alternative.

Hang a pot, put a seedling upside down through the hole in the pot, pack foam rubber (my alternative to using a plastic bag) around the stalk to seal, fill it with potting soil, feed and water.

So far no bugs, no staking, no broken stems, just lots of tomatoes! Although, one plant is almost touching the ground, so I will trim it up so it does not get bugs from the ground.

I just harvested today to make a Lebanese Tabbouleh salad:

Home Grown Diced Tomatoes

Fresh Minced Parsley (not a little, LOTS)

Fresh Minced Garlic (personal preference)

Fresh Squeezed Lime Juice (a little)

Salt & Pepper to taste

The way to multi-national corporate doom may be broad, but Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping are saving souls from the fiery flames and pointing them on the narrow path of righteousness and sutainability. The right reverend has major Pasadena cred. for coming out this year to serve as grand marshall for the Doo Dah Parade – the more weird (and thus superior?) version of the Rose Parade. All the more reason you should go now and rent (try local option Penny Lane Videos on South Lake) or buy a copy of “What Would Jesus Buy” – a new documentary featuring the evangelistic journey of Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping to save the world from the shopocalypse.

I appreciated this film on many levels – not least that it is just plain well-done. As it relates to our discussion here I want to point out the solutions the film points toward amidst the proclamtion of consumer-induced doom. The Church of Stop Shopping nuances the cease shopping argument a little as the film goes on by admitting that no one can just STOP shopping entirely. The way out of this quandry? BUY LOCAL (with an additional nod to fair trade)!

If you are more of the altar call type – and not so excited by numbers and graphs – then this film will have you repenting of your shopping sins and signing a pledge card to use your consumer power more wisely – Rev. Billy may even cast out the demon of consumerism from your very body as you reach to touch the TV screen Jimmy Swaggart style.

One of the many things that stuck with me from the film was one commentators note as the camera panned across a busy suburban neighborhood that with the lack of sidewalks and public spaces in our neighborhoods we are all either in our homes or in a car headed for a shopping mall. We deserve more than that. Repent and be saved from the Shopocalypse – Oh and buy local!

Visit our home page for Buy Local Pasadena

Lost in the supermarket? from PhysOrg.com

Why the ‘cheap food revolution’ hasn’t reached poor countries

Most people don’t think twice as they pass spring apples from the southern hemisphere as they enter the supermarket, but they are participating in a cheap food revolution that has swept the industrialized world over the past couple of generations. The supermarket is the last step in a complicated global process that has changed every aspect of how we produce and consume food. In theory, the arrival of supermarkets in a country should bring with it the “cheap food” that we have enjoyed for so many years.

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